Monday, 16 May 2011

In his blog post The schizophrenic Council, Ronny Patz saw the real face of the Council of the European Union as that of an EU institution

…that may have started to understand how 21st century PR works but that has not yet understood how 21st century democracy should look like.

Kudos to Reijo Kemppinen for presenting the Council view about restricted and privileged access to information.

However, Kemppinen's arguments miss the fundamental principles of equality of and equal attention to the citizens of the EU (Article 9 TEU), as well as the guiding values of a union 'in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen' (Article 1 TEU).

This is more than a bureaucratic slip.

The guiding principles are relevant to both the apples of access to documents and the oranges of running communication work of the EU Council (as well as the other EU institutions).